Sunday, 10 August 2008

The Georgian parliament has explicitly declared that the country is in a state of war with Russia. Certainly, Russian planes have attacked Georgian territory with the bombardment of the city of Gori, from which Georgian military forces were being dep...

Our aim – and that of schools – is to help all children do the best they can. Tests are simply tools which can help teachers achieve that – as well as focusing everyone on the core skills young people need. Tests also create accountability in the edu...

You see, last week, alongside the usual pictures of bra-less celebrities "smuggling peanuts", WAGs falling out of nightclubs and Lily Allen falling out of her clothes, The Sun's celebrity pages wrote about a musician called Burial. Which came as some...

First of all, let us take the film on its own terms and peer into the minds of some of the characters. The Joker has a similar slash across his face, a permanent sadistic smile which, he explains, he acquired because his drunken father carved it into...

Our society, not ministers, has given priority to paid work above the raising of children. We avoid the issue by talking about economic necessity, career fulfilment, gender stereotyping and the benefits of working – anything to disguise that fact. Wh...

Recent experience has exposed concerns that must be allayed. The first, but not necessarily the most important, relates to process. There were big problems with the actual mechanical process of marking this year's Sats, including delays and computer ...

This former British hill station in the north-eastern state of Meghalaya, fragrant with the scent of pine and blessed with cool breezes, is known as the town that rocks. Remarkably, many international stars will play in Shillong while bypassing India...

These supposedly massive burdens are costing his station £300m per year. Hang on a minute. Did Mr Grade really say £300m? Press the rewind button. Yes he did, but the licence is in fact free; the £300m he keeps banging on about is the cost of making ...

In 1951, the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, later renamed BP, was desperate to build refineries in the UK, as 80 per cent of its refining capacity had just been nationalised by the Iranian state. The British government, which owned the majority sharehold...

My daughter had measles when she was five. She developed a high fever and then came out in spots and felt poorly for a few days. She was kept warm but given fresh air and water, and she emerged with a cleansing of inherited and acquired toxins, an en...

Whether he goes any further will depend on his courage. You see some of the braver souls watching the jellyfish around them while standing shoulder-deep in water. But our man will most likely walk back up the beach and start reading his newspaper, ho...

I had embarked on a crash course of literary classics to keep up with Russian friends who, in the absence of anything contemporary, read the best of the past. The idea of something being published that not only told the truth about Stalin, but was al...

The Georgian President, Mikheil Saakashvili, elected in a landslide in 2004 on a manifest destiny platform of restoring national unity, has miscalculated and may have stepped into a Russian trap. Vladimir Putin came to see Georgia as Russia's Cuba – ...

The 'Independent' titles do have a style ruling on this – albeit a rather high-minded one, quoting an incorrect usage from the paper, which runs: "A sex killer was jailed for life yesterday for the murder of his lover who he strangled and fed to the ...

Fifth in the same event in 2004, Cooke returned to the Olympic arena to give a performance of tremendous character, helped in no small measure by the selfless contribution of her two team-mates. Cycling now has the distinction of having produced Brit...

Are the Tories abandoning their green credentials? Writing in 'The Times' last week, Alice Thomson convincingly argued that being green is no longer cool, noting that David Cameron has only given one environmental speech since Christmas. Meanwhile...